For transgenre cinema
In the 1980s
there were those
who prophesied,
somewhat prematurely, the death
of cinema.
Cinema is not
dead, thank God,
it’s still showing
signs of life,
but it is undergoing transformations
and metamorphoses, some of which
at times seem outrageous, at others
simply delightful mutations. And this
is happening in all areas: production,
direction, distribution… Formally,
cross-contamination between video art,
film, music and performances now seems
fairly standard, both in commercial
as well as experimental film. Let us
not mince words: in these new trends
there is as much conformity and mediocrity
as in the “le cinéma de papa”. We’ve
lost count of the number of artists turned
filmmakers (for better or for worse)
and filmmakers switching to contemporary
art (idem), invited to mount exhibitions

News

or make installations. Some resist
the siren call of the visual arts and new
technologies, unswervingly loyal to film,
and indeed to 35mm (this isn’t a question
of age – for example Lisandro Alonso,
35, president of the Pardi di domani Jury);
but they are few in number, and for
how long? It would be tedious to cite
the numerous examples of “transgenre”
cinema screening at the Festival del film
Locarno this year, across all the programme
sections. We have chosen those films that
defy easy categorisation, that pursue an inspired and freewheeling artistic trajectory.
Let us salute two unusual artists who are
making a different kind of cinema,
with an imagination and formal invention that has a touch of genius: Philippe
Parreno, to whom Locarno pays tribute
with a Piazza Grande screening of hitherto
unseen images (InvisibleBoy) and Quentin
Dupieux, a musician who has filmed
the adventures of a psychopathic tire,
using stop-frame, in the Californian desert.
It’s called Rubber. Bizarre or what?
(Olivier Père)

Serbia is back
The Serbian Film Centre is celebrating
Serbia’s return to the official programme
of the Festival del film Locarno after more
than 10 years, with Oleg Novković’s
Beli beli svet (White White World) in the
Concorso internazionale, and Nikola
Lezaic’s Tilva Roš in the Concorso Cineasti
del presente.”The selection confirms
that new generation of Serbian filmmakers is now beginning to win international
recognition,” said acting director Miroljub
Vučković, of the Serbian Film Centre.
Today Serbia stages 20 full-length productions or regional co-productions annually.

Numbers of the Festival

168

Tyres during the filming of Rubber

17

Years since the "discovery" of director
Aktan Arym Kubat at the Festival

Countries that have so far been highlighted
in the Open Doors programme in the last
eight years
Head of editorial team
Lorenzo Buccella
Editorial
Boris Sollazzo
Jorn Rossing Jensen
Kevin Soar
Mattia Bertoldi
Mark Peranson
Roberto Turigliatto
Robert Koehler

Rubber revolutionises film language.
How did the crazy idea for the year 2010
come about?
You don’t decide to be revolutionary,
you just are..
Music, film and video art.
Are you an artist 3.0?
No, I’m just an artist.
an artist owes it to himself to experiment
in several domains. If not, he’s a coward.

Quentin
Dupieux
5 questions to
Or was it Mr. Oizo?
In either case,
their Rubber
unspools on
the Piazza Grande

“

Quentin Dupieux is a schizophrenic
gash in creative conformity and
independent culture, somewhere between
Beckett and Debord. He hates moulds,
whether they come from the market or
radical chic. He even hates his own.
He sold – or rather rented – his Mr. Oizo
to a multinational, to allow himself film
and music without compromises. Some
thought it was a bluff, others lambasted
him.Short-sighted producers are still
kicking themselves. In reality, he’s a genius
who punches a hole in the present.
And he knows it

Chi sono io? Un artista
e uno spirito libero.
Con la barba

From Gondry to Mr.Oizo, who is
Quentin Dupieux? A genius,
a revolutionary, an experimenter,
a madman?
Gondry? What do you mean?
I’ve simply had dinner with him
a couple of times.
Who is Quentin Dupieux?
he’s a free-spirited artist with a beard.
You refuse all the usual categories.. Is that
because as a musician and a commercials
director you know them well?
I don’t know much at all.
I just do what I feel like.
Nonfilm, Steak and Rubber: what are
the main features of your poetic language?
I like emptiness.
P.s.
What do you want to do when you grow up?
Meet you so I can finally figure out what
these ill-conceived questions are all about.
(Boris Sollazzo)

The little man
against a mean world
Wedged between a long history of existence without electricity
and a ruthless present and future where money and power could
overwhelm everything in its path, the rural Krygyzstan village
of Kok-Moinok is a place on the verge. There is the sleepy farming
town that the nearby train zooms past as if it didn’t exist, a place where
electrician Svet-Ake helps locals to “steal” power off the grid
by manipulating electrical meter. But, in contrast to this benign and lovable
Robin Hood, there is also the threat of a rapacious brand of capitalism in
the form of a land developer planning to grab as many hectares
as he can. Writer-director and Locarno favorite Aktan Arym Kubat
— winner of the 1993 Pardi di domani for The Swing and the 1998 Pardo
d’argento for The Adopted Son — isn’t prone to act in his own films. But
here he is on screen in The Light Thief, investing the character of Svet-Ake
with a quietly rebellious streak and a chaplinesque sense of the little man
facing off against a mean world. Short, stubby and with the face
of a chipmunk, Svet-Ake may appear at first to be a man who can’t be
taken seriously, but through a series of local and civic customs and
everyday behavior, he commands respect from those who know him best,
including the kindly town mayor Esen. He’s also disarmingly smart:
it turns out that Svet-Ake is a visionary, whose dream is to build a windmill
farm to harness the nearby winds. In the end, however, he may also be
something of a Don Quixote, failing against forces which Kubat — a director
who helpfully refuses to make a single frame of his film picturesque —
clearly views as dark and bound to win.
(Robert Koehler)

Drop-out detective on the case
The most critically acclaimed American
film of the year to date, the irresistible
Cold Weather is an adventurous
and entertaining great leap forward
from already celebrated independent
filmmaker Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA,
Quiet City) After dropping out of forensic
science school, Doug (an endearing Cris
Lankenau) returns home to Portland,
Oregon, moves in with his sister, Gail
(Trieste Kelly Dunn), and soon taking
a job in an ice-making factory—no kidding—to pay the bills. When his ex-girlfriend rolls into town on business
of her own, a series of mysterious events
conspire to throw the Sherlock
Holmes-loving Doug and his factory
compadre Carlos (Raúl Castillo) into
a full-blown fiction—one that may or may
not be of their own creation. With Cascadian vistas crisply shot by cinematographer Andrew Reed and crackling dialogue
(by the director and fellow producers
Ben Stambler and Brendon McFadden),
Aaron Katz’s shape-shifting feature
is a delicious amalgam of family-bonding
drama, mumblecore riff, and genuinely

Terrible discovery

involving genre exercise. By injecting
a healthy dose of plot into a well-rounded
character dramedy about real people
and their (mostly) real-life dilemmas, Katz
jars American independent cinema out
of its navel-gazing doldrums—there hasn’t
been a movie this fresh and genuinely
funny for what seems like ages.
(M.P.)

Set in a snow-swept, remote part
of the Québec countryside where dead
bodies tend to inexplicably turn up
by the side of the road, Denis Côté’s
Curling delves into the unusual life of one
Jean-François (aka “Mr. Moustache”),
whose odd jobs include setting up the
pins in a bowling alley, and tending to his
awkward ten-year-old daughter Julyvonne,
who he keeps shut up in their home,
isolated from the rest of society. (They’re
superbly played by real-life father and
daughter Emmanuel and Philomène Bilodeau). Paralyzed in their ordered routine,
the fragile balance of their relationship
is jeopardized when Julyvonne dares to
venture outwards, and a terrible discovery
sets her on a path away from shelter to
something simply known as “life.” Côté
is almost a Ticino resident, as with his fifth
feature he returns for a fourth stint in competition in Locarno (plus, his short
Les lignes ennemies is being screened
this year as part of the Jeonju Digital
Project, and last year he served on the
Concorso Cineasti del presente jury).
A former critic and well-known cinephile,
Côté has made a work with strong echoes
of Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive
and Charles Laughton’s The Night of the
Hunter, but even more than these masterworks, is eager to leave spaces between
in the notes, and details unresolved
for viewers’ imaginations to take over.
Expertly shot by Josée Deshaies, the result
is a kind of daytime noir, with a mysterious
atmosphere that’s both compelling
and more than a little disturbing. And,
yes, Winter Olympics fans, there is curling.
(Mark Peranson)

A sprawling industrial zone comprised
of numerous junkyards and auto salvage
shops, the area in Queens, New York called
Willet’s Point is a slice of America far from
First World affluence, even if geographically it’s located literally only metres away:
the area is currently slated for demolition
to create a “tourist zone” next to the New
York Mets’ new baseball stadium. This
is a minority world of recycled refuse,
where both the used cars and the system
itself are in states of rusted disrepair.
Verenda Paravel and J. P. Sniadecki’s
observational documentary Foreign Parts

gives a face to both the neighbourhood
(earlier given life onscreen in Rahman
Bahrani’s fictional Chop Shop) and its bustling community, for a large part comprised
of immigrants, homeless men and women,
and runaways barely managing to scrape
by. Shot on and off over three years, through scalding summers and frigid winters,
the eye-opening Foreign Parts deserves
to stand alongside the best of Wiseman
in its attention to the daily functioning
of a societal substratum, and the manner
by which its directors dissect a sharp world
of indelible sights and sounds. The film will
be preceded by Sweetgrass director Lucien
Castaing-Taylor’s latest sheep short Hell
Roaring Creek, another view of America—
the pastoral—and, like Foreign Parts, a film
about a way of life that’s on the verge
of disappearing forever. Both are products
of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab where Castaing-Taylor is a professor and Sniadecki and Paravel students.
(Mark Peranson)

From the Open Doors Factory to the Concorso internazionale
”Obviously the ideal outcome,” says
Martina Malacrida, responsible
for the section, who will this year open
the doors to Central Asia.
Unspooling in this year’s Concorso internazionale, Chinese director Li Hongqi’s third
feature, Han jia (Winter Vacation) is a new
film – still it has been in Locarno before.
In 2009 Han jia was presented in the Open
Doors Factory, the festival’s co-production
laboratory where projects from a selected country or region are introduced to
potential partners in the international film
industry.
”Following the presentation the film
was fully financed, which is obviously
the ideal outcome of participating in the
Factory,” explains Martina Malacrida,
who is for the first time in charge of Open
Doors.”Preparing for the 2010 edition,
we realised that for a long time we had
had little news from Central Asia, so we
went to Kazakhstan and Tajikistan to set
up a programmme also including Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.”
”We were met by a new generation

of filmmakers, a huge enthusiasm, also
some talent – and a region where film
production is sparse due to the financial
situation, and where film schools are few.”
All five republics are represented in the
Open Doors Screenings between 5-14
August; from 114 submissions twelve
projects were selected for the co-production laboratory which takes place between
7-10 August.
A workshop on Film Production in Central
Asia, based on a case study of Kyrgyz
director Aktan Arum Kubat’s Piazza Grande
entry, Svet-Ake (The Light Thief), has been
scheduled for 7 August.
And 10 August’s round table on The New
Cinema in Central Asia will be concluded
by an awards ceremony for the Open Doors
CHF50,000 (€36,590) production grant,
the €7,000 development support (with
CNC), and the €6,000 ARTE Prize.
(Jørn Rossing Jensen)

05 Pardo News 8 | 8 | 2010

With a brand new concept and design, the Festival daily “Pardo News” offers interviews and articles on the films in the 2010 selection plus photo reports and the latest news. The Festival daily «Pardo News» is distributed every night on the Piazza Grande, in all the Festival venues and the Locarno hotels.